Is matter an
illusion? Is
the universe floating on a vast sea of light, whose invisible power
provides
the resistance that gives to matter its feeling of solidity?
Astrophysicist
Bernhard Haisch and his colleagues have followed the equations to some
compelling -- and provocative -- conclusions.

"God said, ‘Let
there be
light,’ and there was light."

It is certainly a
beautiful
poetic statement. But does it contain any science? A few years ago I
would
have dismissed that possibility. As an astrophysicist, I knew all too
well
the blatant contradictions between the sequence of events in Genesis
and the physics of the Universe. Even after substituting eons for days,
the order of events was obviously wrong. It made no sense to have light
come first, and then to claim that the Sun, the moon and the stars —
the
obvious sources of light in the night sky of the ancient world — were
created
only subsequently, be it days or eons later. One could, of course,
generalize
light to mean simply energy, and thus claim a reference to the Big
Bang,
but that would, to me, be more of a stretch than a revelation.

My first inkling
that the
deceptively simple "Let there be light" might actually contain a
profound
cosmological truth came in early July 1992. I was trying to wrap things
up in my office in Palo Alto so that I could spend the rest of the
summer
doing research on the X-ray emission of stars at the Max Planck
Institute
in Garching, Germany. I came in one morning just before my departure
and
found a rather peculiar message on my answering machine; it had been
left
at 3 a.m.by a usually sober-minded colleague, Alfonso Rueda, a
professor
at California State University in Long Beach. He was so excited by the
results of a horrifically-long mathematical analysis he had been
grinding
through that he just had to tell me about it, knowing full well I was
not
there to share the thrill.

What he had
succeeded in
doing was to derive the equation: F=ma. Details would
follow
in Germany.

Most people will
take this
in stride with a "so what?" or "what does that mean?" After all what
are F, m
and a, and what is so noteworthy about a scientist deriving a
simple
equation? Isn't this what scientists do for a living? But a physicist
will
have an incredulous reaction because you are not supposed to be able to
derive
the equation F=ma. That equation was postulated by Newton in
his Principia,
the foundation stone of physics, in 1687. A postulate is a law that you
assume
to be true, and from which other things follow: such as much of
physics,
for example, from that particular postulate. You cannot derive
postulates.
How do you prove that one plus one equals two? The answer is,
you
don't. You assume that abstract numbers work that way, and then derive
other properties of addition from that basic assumption.

But indeed, as I
discovered
when I began to write up a research paper based on what Rueda soon sent
to Garching, he had indeed derived Newton's fundamental "equation of
motion."
And the concept underlying this analysis was the existence of a
background
sea of light known as the electromagnetic
zero-point field of the quantum vacuum.

To understand
this zero-point
field (for short), consider an old-fashioned grandfather clock with its
pendulum swinging back and forth. If you don't wind the clock ,
friction
will sooner or later bring the pendulum to a halt. Now imagine a
pendulum
that gets smaller and smaller, so small that it ultimately becomes
atomic
in size and subject to the laws of quantum physics. There is a rule in
quantum physics called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle
that
states (with certainty, as it happens) that no quantum object, such as
a microscopic pendulum, can ever be brought completely to rest.
Any microscopic object will always possess a residual random jiggle
thanks
to quantum fluctuations.

Radio, television
and cellular
phones all operate by transmitting or receiving electromagnetic waves.
Visible light is the same thing; it is just a higher frequency form of
electromagnetic waves. At even higher frequencies, beyond the visible
spectrum,
you find ultraviolet light, X-rays and gamma-rays. All are
electromagnetic
waves which are really just different frequencies of light.

It is standard in
quantum
theory to apply the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to electromagnetic
waves, since electric and magnetic fields flowing through space
oscillate
like a pendulum. At every possible frequency there will always be a
tiny
bit of electromagnetic jiggling going on. And if you add up all these
ceaseless
fluctuations, what you get is a background sea of light whose total
energy
is enormous: the zero-point field. The "zero-point" refers to the
fact
that even though this energy is huge, it is the lowest possible energy
state. All other energy is over and above the zero-point state.
Take
any volume of space and take away everything else — in other words,
create
a vacuum — and what you are left with is the zero-point field. We can imagine
a true vacuum, devoid of everything, but the real-world quantum
vacuum is permeated by the zero-point field with its ceaseless
electromagnetic
waves.

The fact that
the zero-point
field is the lowest energy state makes it unobservable. We see
things
by way of contrast. The eye works by letting light fall on the
otherwise
dark retina. But if the eye were filled with light, there would be no
darkness
to afford a contrast. The zero-point field is such a blinding light. Since
it is everywhere, inside and outside of us, permeating every atom in
our
bodies, we are effectively blind to it. It blinds us to its
presence.
The world of light that we do see is all the rest of the light that is
over and above the zero-point field.

We cannot
eliminate the zero-point
field from our eyes, but it is possible to eliminate a little bit of it
from the region between two metal plates. (Technically, this has to do
with conditions the electromagnetic waves must satisfy on the plate
boundaries.)
A Dutch physicist, Hendrik Casimir, predicted in 1948 exactly how much
of the zero-point field would end up being excluded in the gap between
the plates, and how this would generates a force, since there is then
an
overpressure on the outside of the plates. Casimir predicted the
relation
between the gap and the force very precisely. You can, however, only
exclude
a tiny fraction of the zero-point field from the gap between the plates
in this way. Counterintuitively, the closer the plates come together,
the more
of the zero-point field gets excluded, but there is a limit to this
process
because plates are made up of atoms and you cannot make the gap between
the plates smaller than the atoms that constitute the plates. This Casimir
force has now been physically measured, and the results agree very
well with his prediction.